The University of Chicago Press publishes the book ‘Long-Term Care around the World’, which was edited by UCLA Professor Kathleen McGarry and MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber. The book, which analyzes both formal and informal long-term care in developed countries, can be found here.

Our faculty member, Professor Dora Costa, was featured in a recent New York Times article titled “Have Americans Really Been Healthy?“. The article explores the historical context of health in the United States, with Professor Costa providing insights into the challenges of American diets and lifestyle in the 19th and early 20th centuries. She highlights how limited access to fresh produce and cultural habits, such as heavy drinking, shaped public health during that era. Read more about her fascinating contributions in this engaging piece.

Professor Adriana Lleras-Muney receives R01 Grant from the National Institute of Health for her research project “The Effect of Childhood Environments on Adult Health and Mortality”. “In the project, Professor Lleras-Muney constructs a new dataset linking individual childhood environments at a granular level to individual life spans for large representative samples of Blacks and Whites. She follows the approaches of previous work to investigate the causal effects of childhood environments on longevity.She focuses on two important areas with the potential to have large and long lasting effects on health and longevity: school and the disease environments. To estimate the impacts of school, she uses newly digitized data at the city level on the determinants of school quality (e.g. teacher pay) and follows previous approaches in the literature, but estimates them at the city level and tracks mortality outcomes for the entire lifetime of individuals. To estimate the causal effects of childhood infections, she will build on existing evidence that there was an important reduction in infectious disease mortality in cities in the 1920s due to reduced immigration and the associated improvement in living conditions that prevailed in cities. She will conduct the analysis separately by race. She will also examine the interaction of the childhood education environment and infectious disease environment on longevity and their joint effects on racial disparities.”